CWuestefeld, good points. I'd forgotten about pre-remote days. How about:

The days when they played music on the radio?

Leaded gasoline!

The BBS days?

There is still some AM/FM (non-sattelite) radio music, and I have often asked why the heck it is still called "UNLEADED Gasoline" (hasn't it been long enough? Like those "ONE DAY ONLY" sales that go on for like 5 months?), but what is the BBS?

The spinning takes-an-hour-to-dial phones! And black and white TV (I Love Lucy and other older shows I watch are in Black and White, before "Technicolor")! Organic food (non-man/machine/pollutant/mutant made) is available, if you know where to look...

I got no idea what a 45 is, a dot-matrix printer, or a LP is, though. I have seen a tube based TV, 5" floppy (litterally) disks, an 8 track player and the old tape backup drives, but not much else I can think of.

In-car phones spring to mind, though. Those were fun to play with while your parents are barking at you to stop playing with them going down the road at 60 MPH...

TIF (not graphics but a DB platform for IBM mainframes, kinda analogous to Access. I can't even find a web page for it)

FORTRAN

Rexx - scripting language for IBM mainframes and OS/2. Pretty cool, actually, anticipating some of the features of today's dynamic languages. Here, here, and here. Internally, IBM had a visual tool for building client-server apps in Rexx, internally called "Red October" iirc, that could have been a VB-killer, but they never released it -- letting it die just like OS/2

Yeah, remember when a phone RANG? Like with a real BELL and everything?(see attachment in previous post)The next time I hear someone's phone go "Doop Dippity Doop Doop" or blast the latest pop hit as the startled owner frantically fumbles in their purse or pocket to quiet the vile wireless beastie will be WAAAY too soon...

my "ring tone" is a voice saying: FOLLOW THE SOUND OF MY VOICE AND KILL WHOEVER HAS THIS CELL PHONE". i hate having one and i truly mean it. but it is a neccisity as i have medical conditions and have family with same, I had a cell phoe when they where big ol' bricks litterally and had to be installed in the car.and a pager that was almost as large.

What an amazing hack! All those little 128K DOS machines (with their state-of-the-art 9600 baud modems!!!) passing e-mail messages back and forth every day during "fidonet hour" so that members could have free e-mail outside their long-distance area. Then when the radio amateurs got their solder-burned hands on it - and started wedding it to their ARRL network to provide teletype services and slow-scan video... ahh, those were fun times! Nobody had a clue about what they were doing. They just went out and did it. But somehow it created a lot of neat stuff we're still using today, along with the public demand to create what has now become known as the Internet.

I remember when a screen like this was once as exciting as webbing out to Donation Coder or Eve Online...

First there was antique radio . Now there is antique software!

BTW - there are still some BBSs out here if you want to play with them. To fire up the time machine and see a living fossil in action, try telenetting out to:

shadow.skeleton.org

Use ASCI terminal or VT100 emulation on default port-23. Login as bbs with nopassword. Enter a ? to get help using the system.

I first had a 300-baud direct-connect modem for my Atari 800 (a MPP-1000C). When connecting to an identical modem, it had the unique capability of negotiating a connection up to 450 baud. We were flying!

Once, in college, my modem died and I had to borrow an acoustic modem. Living in a fraternity house, it was frequently noisy enough to interfere with this modem. I used to make the connection, and then wrap up the modem-and-phone-receiver in a towel to block out the noise.

Remember waiting ages for a 100KB download? And when you finally got it, it was corrupt because the checksum in the XModem protocol wasn't very good? Finally they came out with ZModem, and you got better error checking plus batching files.

What I find very interesting about Analog vs. Digital is that for many years the controllers for videogame consoles had only digital buttons (on or off) but when the analog joystick(s) came along (and eventually even analog (pressure-sensitive) buttons), it was one of the greater innovations brought to videogaming.

It's the only case I can think of where digital came first and analog is actually considered superior technology.

Maybe for most game consoles that holds true, but remember the pong games? The paddles were analog, and I have a pair of (very) old joysticks I bought at a thrift shop because I was going to wire up a 4-way fader for a DJ friend. One is a Tandy, the other an IBM and they both have potentiometers in them... That's analog, baby!I remember drawing with similar joystick units back in the Apple II days.Oh hey! Speaking of drawing, remember Koala pads? Analog.

I think it's a case of old technology being re-worked into more useful and accurate 'new' technology.